This past week’s Winter Term fair included a variety of interesting options for Oberlin students to choose from this coming January. Some of us will go to Sweden to study Yoga, a few people will go to midwifery school in Chicago, some are already set on spending the month studying intensive Russian here in Oberlin, but many Oberlin students will participate in some kind of internship, all of which will be work without compensation. While there are many values to unpaid internships, I also believe that there are considerations we should keep in mind:

Internships require privilege. The truth is that you need a certain amount of financial security in order to be able to work for free. There are only a few options for you to remain fiscally stable while holding a non-paying job. Perhaps your school subsidizes or stipends your internship, though this is unlikely. Maybe you hold down a paying job at the same time as an internship, though this is difficult with full-time internships. Most likely, it’s your parents who are subsidizing your charitable contribution of labor. If you think about that, it means that unpaid internships are helping the most privileged get yet another head start in the work world.

Internships are about making connections and building resumés. Internships are not necessarily about learning real skills. Take, for example, a friend of mine who worked at a high profile magazine over the summer: He had a fine time at his internship, but the highlight of his summer internship was not filing magazines or lifting boxes — it was a lunch date with a very important editor. The truth is, he didn’t learn very much about writing and editing over the summer. The real value of his internship was the connections he made and the name that he can now attach to his resumé.

Internships do not really prepare you for the real world. While it may provide valuable connections and fodder for your resumé, your unpaid internship probably does not prepare you for the real work world. Internships are ingraining our generation — one particularly devoted to resumé building — with a slavish mentality. When we are finally released from our comfortable lives as Oberlin students and our parents stop subsidizing our work, I am afraid that we will make foolish mistakes, allowing ourselves to be underpaid or under-compensated just because we think that a job will provide us with “good experience” or help us make “good connections.”

However, I am not entirely against unpaid internships. I held an intern position once and it was one of the most interesting and instructional things I have ever done. Mine was valuable for me and I don’t rule out the possibility of doing another in the future. I do, though, think it’s important that we don’t take these opportunities for granted.

The truth is that we are living in a highly competitive world and the jobs that many of us want when we graduate — in the media, in politics, in the art world — are among the most competitive out there. But I think it’s important for us to realize that not everyone can be comfortably ensconced in a cushy office job that will give him a head start in his professional life.

I wonder if perhaps we might all learn a little bit more about the world by doing some “real” work, either gutting houses in New Orleans or busing tables at a local restaurant. While these things might not look quite as impressive on a professional resumé, they may be the most instructional opportunities of all.

Just something to keep in mind as you fill out those little Winter Term project cards.